My experiment with a photo challenge. Proof that having a DSLR camera does not a photographer make.

Tuesday, January 1, 2013

Day One- Favorite Food

Here is a picture of little bit enjoying some hot chocolate. He burned his tongue on some that was too hot the other day so his eyes show a great deal of trepidation.

I tried playing around with the F-stop on this one but, mostly, I just like the facial expression here. And I actually think this might have been taken before I took the camera off of automatic setting.

1 comment:

Criticism is much easier to give than encouragement, so please praise yourself and your efforts before and after my technical remarks:

The praise: Kids are cute, and make great subjects. Great job of not center composing.

This does look like it was shot on auto, because the pop-up flash was used and because the thing in focus is the thing closest to the camera. The subject is a little ambiguous because the mug is placed in a visually strong spot (rule of thirds) and is in focus and bright, but Mr T's face is so present and almost in focus. I also think I would like to see more of his head. The blanket isn't visually important, so you could shift the whole composition up more.

Just like with correcting your students work, it's so much easier to put red ink to mark errors than in is to let them know all the things they're doing right.I think it's important to post camera settings, so you can see trends and identify what works when. If you haven't already, read up on how your autofocus points work. I almost always keep my center point as the only active one, focus the camera with that on the subject's eye, and then (keeping the shutter button half depressed) recompose and take the photo. The caveat is that canon has admitted that the xsi has a back-focusing problem with this method, particularly with distances under 15 feet. There is a firmware update available.